That's the unexamined question that will only become more pressing – and less clear – when Facebook shortly completes its IPO, with more and more people in plain old media feeling they ought to be in social media. And with more and more people in social media, with a $100bn or so of new liquid currency in the market, feeling it is the future of media.

As it happens, the dual media have almost nothing in common except that they both occupy people's time and are supported by advertising. On the other hand, both try to pretend they are, or can be, like the other.

Everybody in plain old media is trying to figure out some way to claim that it has a "social component", which means not much more than that it has a Facebook page and an employee with a title that involves social media. And everybody in social media is of the confident, but completely groundless, belief that what they are doing will sell products just as well or better than plain old media.

"Social is a fabric; it connects the individual nodes that make up the human network," says Brian Solis, who describes himself as one of the most prominent thought leaders and published authors in new media. It is that kind of gas that has long confused the issue.

Right now, the indisputable point is that plain old media, even as it steadily loses its claim on people's time, continues to attract a larger, and increasingly disproportionate share, of advertising dollars, just as social media becomes increasingly dependent on them. Eighty-two per cent of Facebook's revenues come from advertising – a much higher percentage even than that of plain old media.

The television upfront season just beginning, wherein advertisers bid for space in the upcoming television year, is expected once again to make the point that advertisers, when it comes to paying real money, pay it to television. At the same time, this is confusing because brands and advertising agencies talk almost nonstop about their commitment to, and hopes for, social media. Likewise, social media itself has been nearly messianic, and largely unchallenged, in its entirely faith-based certainty that it is the future of advertising.

In fact, as Facebook acknowledged last week, one of the few certain things about Facebook's future is that it will be increasingly a mobile medium, and mobile – in part, because there really is no room on the screen – is an even less hospitable advertising form than a user page.

But back to the mix-up. It is curious that of the many loquacious, self-dramatizing, and overly social people at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg was there who were destined for the media business (Harvard being a hot bed of television writers and media executives), Zuckerberg was not one of them. Mark Zuckerberg was their opposite, not only in terms of personality, but in terms of worldview. The media kids wanted to hold power over their audience; Zuckerberg wanted to empower an audience.

Giving power to your audience certainly seems to have a historical imperative behind it. But awkwardly, social media still depends on advertising which, fundamentally, depends in turn on a set of top-down manipulations that control what your audience thinks and feels at a given moment.

Still, advertising is a supple, price-related form. One of the most successful forms of advertising ever is the yellow pages: its costs are low enough to make its relative lack of effectiveness still worthwhile to the advertiser, and there are enough advertisers, and yellow pages are cheap enough to produce, that it's profitable for the publisher, too. That's the Google model; it's the ultimate yellow pages.

And that's the current Facebook model. It has so many eyeballs that it can sell them for next to nothing and because it doesn't pay anything for creating the content that the eyeballs are seeing, it's been able to generate some nice numbers. But its $100bn-plus valuation vastly exceeds the value of its relatively low value ads, meaning it really has to become much more like television than like Google.

Except that it isn't television. It doesn't really even have an audience – that is, people thinking and feeling something similar (ideally, all at once). And it isn't run by people who even care about media – or doing what media does: that is, holding people's attention by means of pain, or charm, or jokes. (Facebook will eventually try, like all other internet companies, to hire media people – but they won't get the jokes.)

Of course, the future is coming and we have somehow convinced ourselves that forward-thinking technology companies, by learning so much more about people's behavior and habits and knowing more about them than they do themselves, will somehow, with undreamed-of efficiency, sell them something. And these social media savants will be able to do this without having to rely on the much more mysterious and hit-and-miss process of producing good stories.